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Spatial Estimation of the Impact of Airport Noise on Residential Housing Prices

Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics volume 144, pages 577–606 (2008)Cite this article

Summary

The paper applies spatial econometric techniques to measure the impact of airport noise on the price of single-family homes in the Zurich Airport area. We exploit a large database of geo-referenced noise measurements to investigate the reaction of prices to different noise metrics. The particular institutional setting of Zurich Airport, with changing patterns of runways configurations allows to distinguish the impact of noise at different times of the day. The use of neighborhood fixed-effects is compared to the results given by a costlier modelling strategy involving a rich set of location descriptors. The paper documents the impact of airport noise on housing prices. In the base model specification the Noise Discount Index is 0.97% with typical discounts in the range of −2% to −8%. Accounting for the spatiality of the data has little effect on the results.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Marco Salvi

  2. Zürcher Kantonalbank, Zürich, Switzerland

    Marco Salvi

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  1. Marco Salvi
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Correspondence to Marco Salvi.

Additional information

I am grateful to Patrik Schellenbauer, Philippe Thalmann, Adrian Lüscher, Gion-Reto Hassler, Alice Hollenstein and the editors for their helpful comments and suggestions. I thank the ZKB GIS-team for invaluable help with the GIS. The views expressed herein are my own and do not necessarily represent the views of the ZKB.

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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Salvi, M. Spatial Estimation of the Impact of Airport Noise on Residential Housing Prices. Swiss J Economics Statistics 144, 577–606 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03399267

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03399267

JEL-Classification

  • Q53
  • Q51
  • R31
  • L93
  • C21

Keywords

  • noise
  • airports
  • housing prices
  • hedonic pricing
  • spatial econometrics